Monday, November 17, 2014

Voices Stilled Too Soon

Tenors,
When the Music Stops

Presently I am in the process of attempting to finish my
third novel, You Are My Song. At this
point I am aiming for an early January release, but there’s “no opening night,”
a time constraint I’ve grown accustomed to after some thirty years of directing
musical theater productions. One of my very astute readers pointed that fact
out to me with my first novel, How I Grew
Up, when I seemed to be at the computer day and night and finished the book
in less than five months, which I have learned is – at least for me – breakneck
speed. My second novel, Eli’s Heart,
took about nine months. There is also “no closing night” with a book. It’s
there for any person who chooses to read it and become a member of the audience
for each story I tell.

Back to the nineteen-fifties, the era I continue to “live”
and write in: My character Jamie Logan is a young, good-looking singer from
East Tennessee who decides to pursue an opera career when in his early
twenties. He’d been the star of the music department in high school, but when
he married his high school sweetheart the music stopped. Sarah wasn’t
supportive of Jamie the singer, and he wanted to please her. However, nothing he
did satisfied her, and the marriage failed.

Jamie is a tenor. There is something about the intensity of the
tenor sound which many people respond to differently; something visceral, a
sense that the human voice isn’t intended to soar in this manner and with this
intensity. A good tenor, a really good tenor who can provide that ringing high
note at the end of an aria performed with passion and skill, gives the listener
more than the satisfaction of hearing something extraordinarily beautiful. It
becomes an experience; an “ah” moment.

There’s a bit of a sense of danger
having been circumvented, similar to watching a high wire artist take the final
step to safety, or the circus flier working without a net catching the trapeze
cleanly.

While writing this book I’ve listened to a lot of opera. I’ve
listened to a lot of tenors. I’ve read about a lot of tenors whose lives were
touched by tragedy … the potentially great Mario Lanza, who died at thirty-eight.
Lanza had so much promise and such a huge gift, and seemed to be destined for a
long career as an opera singer. Instead, Hollywood beckoned, and who knows what
his accepting that lure may have cost him.

Jerry Hadley was another fine American tenor who also died
far too young. Hadley had an immensely successful career for many years and
seemed to have the world of opera at his feet … and yet when his marriage
ended, his singing stopped. He was overwhelmed by severe depression for years. It
appeared he was ready to begin a comeback when he ended his own life.

During the Metropolitan Opera’s 2002-2003 season I heard yet
another outstanding American tenor make his first Met appearance in the title
role in Gounod’s Faust. Marcus Haddock
had a beautiful voice and he was already an established international artist.
It was a thrill to be a member of the audience for this auspicious debut.

Some six years later, this very successful tenor suffered
two massive strokes in the course of twenty-four hours. He survived but was left
severely debilitated. The trauma included damage to his vocal mechanism. He’s
begun to do some modest performing but his website does not show any engagements
beyond March of 2014.

From what I’ve read, Haddock is spending a lot of time these
days teaching in his home in upstate New York. To have the kind of career he
had and have it taken from him so abruptly is difficult to imagine, but he
seems to be a man of great courage.

My character Jamie Logan has other challenges to deal with.
While I was writing my first draft I was not aware of Marcus Haddock’s
struggle, and learned of it through Internet searches when I recalled hearing
that Faust performance which had so
impressed me over ten years ago. Ironically, Jamie does have some vocal difficulty
and is unable to sing for a period of time.

Singing again was what Jamie had needed. It was hard to explain to
anyone, but he felt a sense of joy when he sang, a sense of being connected to
everything good and beautiful in the world … no, in the universe. He knew he
was able to produce sounds people liked to hear, and those sounds made him
aware he could share the joy that sometimes was almost overwhelming to him, the
joy that had to find this expression, this love, this beauty.

Meredith had been concerned when Jamie seemed
depressed, and it made her wonder what he would do if for some reason he could
not sing at all … if some terrible illness or accident took his voice from him.
Life is so fragile, she thought. We like to think we have control over our
lives, but we don’t.

Jamie doesn’t
have to face what Marcus Haddock has heroically been dealing with for some five
years at this point. He has other trials to face, and in Jamie’s case, his
music … his singing … is what provides him with the means to deal with those
events. And while there is no way I can know this, I have to think Mr. Haddock’s
music has been his source of sustenance as well. He is still connected to
everything good and beautiful in the universe; music is in his soul. It will
never leave him.

I salute you, Marcus Haddock. You are a courageous man and
an inspiration.

About Me

After growing up in the unique town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, I went to the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati as a vocal performance major. I met and married a tenor and we had three children, and moved to the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania in 1971 where I established a private voice studio and began directing community and high school musical productions. While in Cincinnati I had the good fortune to be on the administrative staff of the Edgecliff Academy of Fine Arts and the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival.

Here in the Poconos, I directed over eighty musicals from 1984-2015, and had the privilege of seeing many of my private voice students become teachers, professional performers, and most of all, find the joy in using their singing voices.

In 2013 I fulfilled a lifelong dream and wrote my first ever book, a novel entitled HOW I GREW UP, My second novel, ELI'S HEART, was published in June, 2014. My third novel, YOU ARE MY SONG, was released in January, 2015. Novel number four, JAMIE'S CHILDREN, was released in July, 2016, and MEMORIES OF JAKE in March, 2017. MAN WITH NO YESTERDAYS is scheduled to be released on Nov. 11, 2017. My first non-fiction book, "MORE FOG, PLEASE" about my 31 years as a director for community and high school musicals, was released on November 11, 2015.